They left the station, and the peasant took them in a cart through the town, over the canal where men naked to the waist were lifting great blocks of marble out of barges, and across a stretch of perfectly flat country till they reached Torre del Lago.

From here they were to climb on foot to Aunt Perdy’s cottage; and the man Tommaso drove off to put the pony up, leaving the women to wait by the roadside with the luggage till his return.

He would be gone about twenty minutes, Aunt Perdy said; so she and Joanna carried their belongings between them, from the road to the shore of the lake which was only a short way off. It would be pleasanter to wait there.

Joanna was entranced by the pale, outspread sheet of water, so different from any of the lochs at home. A mirage, she thought, must look like this. Even before Aunt Perdy told her, she had known it must be quite shallow all over.

When they had been sitting there a few minutes a small, flat-bottomed boat ran softly in to shore, not far from them, swishing between the parted reeds; and the two men in it stepped over the side, and hauled their craft easily some yards inland among the bushes.

Joanna and Aunt Perdy watched, and as the men left the boat and made for the road, Aunt Perdy’s short-sighted eyes narrowed, straining in their direction.

“What are they carrying, Aunt Perdy?” asked Joanna, a note of childish horror in her voice. “They look like big bunches of feathers – but they seem so heavy. Oh, but they are birds! And I believe they are fluttering! They are alive!”

But already her companion was gone, and had descended upon the two peasants like a whirlwind.

“Slaves and cowards!” Aunt Perdy was saying in her peculiar but voluble Italian, when Joanna came up with them. “Ill-educated, without intelligence, pieces of brute-beasts!” (She spared them none of the phrases most wounding to Italians.) “Was it for this, Niddolo, that I nursed your wife night and day for a week when she was delivered of twins? And you, Francesco! You, whose sweet name-saint was the little brother of the birds! Are you not ashamed to fill your disgusting belly with the flesh off these little happy bones?”

“I do not eat them, Signora,” said Francesco sheepishly. “They are for the market. Times are hard. A man must live.”

Aunt Perdy stamped her foot in its zoccolo.

“Idiot!” she retorted. “God have patience with you, for the saints never will! How much do you suppose you will get for them in Viareggio?”

“Two soldi apiece, Signora.”

“Let me buy them from him,” pleaded Joanna, and she felt for her purse. She could not take her eyes off the birds – alive and hanging there in four great bunches. But firmly, almost roughly, her aunt caught back her hand.